Rebecca C. Johnson

Archive of errors: Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, literature, and the world

ABSTRACT Using Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s semi-autobiographical fictional travel narrative from 1855, this article critiques current world literature paradigms that see literary modernity as the entrance into world literary space’s zones of equivalence. Al-Shidyāq’s text, the article argues, encapsulates debates over the origins of Arabic literary modernity, but rejects both the notion that Arabic literary modernity is a European import and that it is product of a national literary past. Rather, in the author’s reading, al-Sāq represents a combative archive of influences and intertexts that is self-consciously multilinguistic and trans-imperial. Analyzing al-Sāq’s engagement with European texts, the article argues for the power of productive misreadings and corrections, as al-Shidyāq places errors at the centre of his comparative methodology. Reading al-Sāq as participating in and theorizing the nahḍah’s own transnational currents, the article argues that al-Shidyāq analyzes literary and linguistic relationships through an attention to error and unintelligibility, posing literary modernity itself as an error-prone aggregation of foreign and domestic forms, styles, and references. Through error, al-Shidyāq creates a mode of world literature in which Arabic literature is not merely the product of a vertical development, but rather is embedded in a larger network of transnational, horizontal associations.

Beautiful Infidels: The Western Travels of The Arabian Nights

to promote a more comparative study of the Jesuit global missionary enterprise, including the role of missionary scientists, the Journal of Jesuit Studies (brill) has sponsored a number of panels dedicated to this very topic at the 2012 annual meeting of the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, and at the 2013 annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. It is to be hoped that the discussions generated at these panels will provide incentive for further scholarship that will deepen our understanding of what Prieto, Hsia, and Abé discuss in their welcomed contributions to the blossoming field of Jesuit studies.